The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [235]
This time, the Vice-Regent of Christ rode alone, in his white silk robe sewn with golden one-headed eagles and his Imperial mitra with its curtain of jewels brushing the august, powdered face. Men and women talked to a doctor: Tobie knew all the gossip. There in her diadem and veil was the princess, a year older than Catherine, who would refer with disdain, through her stammer, to the many husbands they proposed for her. And the young princes, jealous, backbiting, quarrelling—all but George, not yet a year, for whom Tobie had found and mixed a tisane not all that very different from the dose he had given the camel. And there, with a cautious, comradely wink, was the court physician, bored with aphrodisiacs and eye-paint and lipsalve, who had made a first, idle approach and then proceeded, with delightful enthusiasm, to exchange notes and advice, beginning from the books Nicholas had brought. Since then, between them, they had found more. It was what Tobie had been doing all summer, reading books. And looking at sick women and children, and testing new treatments, and listening.
There, packed like charcoal, were the stiffly veiled hats of the churchmen, and the bishops he had seen Godscalc talking to, their glistening white robes spattered with crosses. Here were the Latin monks in their hoods; the well-paid who administered the colony’s churches; the country papas who served the little foreign communities of lay workmen and servants. Who would come just as diligently to a Greek woodsman gored by a hog, as would the Greek papa tend a needy soul of the Roman persuasion. Tobie had heard much, as they all had, about the rapacity of the priests of the East. So far as the City went, it was probably true. Elsewhere, there were decent men who had never heard of the confrontation between the Greek Church and the Roman; the stony turning of backs over differences in phrase or custom or ritual; the opposition of Dia to Ek; the dispute over unleavened bread for the Eucharist; the obdurate schism over the origin and form of the Trinity. The Trinity! What did a choking child care if the Trinity consisted of sparrows?
The procession continued. The Kabasitai, with their gold ceremonial swords; their paper-boat hats with spikes and stiff, fluted brims over their fair, solemn faces. Figures, it once seemed, from Kambalu. Now they were simply the Imperial watch. There was the man who kept getting drunk every Monday, and the one who gambled his shield, and had to serve the eunuchs a week before he was allowed to redeem it. And the lesser soldiers, in turbans, who liked the bang made by handguns and had to be restrained from shooting up houses and stables; and the ones Astorre had had whipped for making the masons carry their shot to the arsenal; and the two or three who had got Nicholas to show them the farmuk, followed by another little unreeling game he had devised with somewhat robust connotations. As the seamen had, so the workmen had come to appreciate Nicholas. Who, of course, worked to that end.
So one had to look at the young men, whom Nicholas also knew although not, Tobie thought, as well as Doria would have them believe. The courtiers in towering elaborate hats and curling hair, brocaded skirts and soft boots, who would never admit Latin merchants to their inner or even their outer circle if they could avoid it. The learned men with forked beards in discreet robes of great value with whom, sometimes, he and Godscalc had been able